U.S. leads globe in incarceration

High percentage raises questions on equity, expense

With a record-setting 2 million people locked up in American jails and prisons, the United States has overtaken Russia and has a higher percentage of its citizens behind bars than any other country.

Those are the latest dreary milestones resulting from a two-decade imprisonment boom that experts say has probably helped reduce crime but also has created ballooning costs and stark racial inequities.

Overseas, U.S. imprisonment policy is widely seen as a blot on a society that prides itself on valuing liberty.

"Why, in the land of the free, should 2 million men, women and children be locked up?" asked Andrew Coyle, director of the International Center for Prison Studies at the University of London and a leading authority on incarceration.

When he discusses crime and punishment with foreign colleagues, Coyle said, the U.S. is such an anomaly that it often must be left out of the discussion.

"People say, `Well, that's the United States.' They see the U.S. as standing entirely on its own," he said.

The latest statistics support that view. The new high of 2,019,234, announced by the Justice Department in April, underscores the extraordinary scale of U.S. imprisonment compared to most of the world.

During the 1990s, the United States and Russia--a far poorer country emerging from totalitarian rule and beset by official corruption and organized crime--vied for the dubious position of having the highest incarceration rate.

But in the past few years, Russian authorities have carried out large-scale amnesties to ease crowding in disease-infested prisons, and the United States has taken first place, at 702 prisoners per 100,000 population. Russia has 665 prisoners per 100,000.

Today the United States imprisons at a rate far greater than that of not only developed Western nations but impoverished and authoritarian countries as well. On a per capita basis, according to the best available figures, the United States has three times more prisoners than Iran, four times more than Poland, five times more than Tanzania and seven times more than Germany.

"This is a pretty serious experiment we've been engaged in," said Vincent Schiraldi, director of the Justice Policy Institute, a Washington think tank that supports alternatives to prison. "I don't think history will judge us kindly."

Bruce Western, a sociologist at Princeton University, says sentencing policies have had a glaringly disproportionate impact on black men. The Justice Department reports that one in eight black men in their 20s and early 30s were behind bars last year, compared with 1 in 63 white men. The chances of a black man going to prison in his lifetime are 1 in 3, the department says.

But some conservative analysts say that however regrettable the prison boom has been, it is working. It's no anomaly that the prison population still is rising despite a decade-long fall in the national crime rate, they say.

"If you put someone in prison, you can be sure they're not going to rob you," said David Muhlhausen, a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation. "Quality research shows that increasing incarceration decreases crime." Considering that there are still about 12 million serious crimes a year, Muhlhausen said, "maybe we're not incarcerating enough people."

A major cause of the explosive prisoner growth is the war on drugs. In 1980, says Marc Mauer, assistant director of the Sentencing Project in Washington, about 40,000 Americans were locked up for drug-only offenses. Now the number is 450,000, three-fourths of them black or Hispanic--though drug use is no higher in those groups than among whites.

A second major reason for the rise in imprisonment is the politically popular shift to longer sentences: mandatory minimums, three-strikes laws and "truth in sentencing" measures to eliminate early parole.

Alfred Blumstein, a prominent criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University, says the most rigorous recent studies suggest that only about 25 percent of the drop in crime in recent years resulted from locking up more criminals. The rest resulted from other factors, among them the ebbing of the crack cocaine epidemic, changed policing strategies and the strong economy of the 1990s.

Now, with many state budgets in crisis, there are hints of a turnaround. Justice Department figures show nine states reduced their prison populations last year, including Illinois, New York and Texas.

"Even some of your more right-wing people are saying, `Let's see what we can do to get some people out of prison to save some money,"' said Reginald Wilkinson, director of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction and president of the association of state prison chiefs.